Trying to Remember EH Book from Childhood with Hillbilly Family

LOOKING FOR A BOOK

Okay, this may not be the place for this but this book got me into the genre as a preteen and I’ve never had luck finding it from a combination of lack of detail and the fact that extreme horror isn’t common in other book talk circles.

Here’s all I am able to remember:

* No memory of the cover cuz I took the sleeve off but it was a thick book
* A group of young adults car breaks down or their tire pops while on some sort of outing
* They somehow end up at a hillbilly-type family’s house
* There’s definitely two parents and the dopey/slow brute son stereotype. Could be more family members but unsure
* I remember there are a couple of scenes in a meat freezer in the family owns that imply cannibalism
* And the most identifiable scene is that the son takes one of the girls to a room and force feeds her some kind of liquid that I am nearly 100% certain was referred to as “pudding.” He also might have used her as a dart board? That part is a bit fuzzy

I read this in 2014/2015 and I found it in a thrift store, so the odds are high that it had come out at most a few years prior before ending up there but I’d guess that it was at least a decade older.

Anyone have any clue? The most similar thing I’ve heard of is Off Season by Jack Ketchum, which I’ve never fully read but I skimmed the Wikipedia article to try and see, and it doesn’t seem right.

Posted May 12, 2026, 6:26 AM UTC

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